How to Search the Web

Most Internet search sites are actually search engines. They employ special software programs (called spiders or crawlers) to roam the Web automatically, feeding what they find back to a massive bank of computers. These computers then build giant indexes of the Web, hundreds of millions of pages strong.

When you perform a search at a search engine site, your query is sent to the search engine's index. (You never actually search the Web itself, you only search the index that was created by the spiders crawling the Web.) The search engine then creates a list of pages in its index that match, to one degree or another, the query you entered.